'Pac's style is often imitated - most recently by Eminem in his "Square Dance" homage where he adopts Tupac's elongated drawl for the lyric "Thug like I'm 'Pac on my enemies" - but he was never known for being hip-hop's top MC..........

Last September, Los Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips released a two-part series that said rapper Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, gave gang members money and a gun with which to kill Tupac, whose murder still remains unsolved.

Biggie and Tupac were friends but had a falling out in 1994 when Tupac was shot five times and accused Biggie and his producer, P. Diddy, of planning the shooting. The schism was at the heart of the East Coast versus West Coast rivalry, primarily because the rappers lampooned each other so publicly, in music videos, award shows and every other chance they got.

Biggie was fatally shot in March of '97, six months after Tupac's death.

The theory presented in the Times went against other theories, including one presented in the book "LAbyrinth," which alleged that Death Row Records frontman Suge Knight paid for the hit because Tupac was planning on leaving the label.

No matter the conjecture, all of these ideas infuriated the hip-hop community. Everyone from Russell Simmons to Ja Rule stepped forward and asked fans not to believe the Times article.

Some of the hardcore fans weren't as concerned with the September 2002 Times article as much as they were with the September 2003 anniversary - the seven-year anniversary of Shakur's death.

Many, including Public Enemy frontman Chuck D., believed Tupac faked his own death to get away from Knight, P. Diddy's burgeoning Bad Boy Records clan and everyone else who wanted him dead. Some think he's gone forever, sitting on some sun-drenched desert island or in Canada getting his tattoos removed.

The other camp played around with numerology and felt Tupac was going to come back to life - be resurrected - exactly seven years after his death. (They got this idea partly because the record released two months after Tupac's death was subtitled "The 7 Day Theory" and released under the pseudonym Makaveli, named after the Italian statesman/writer Niccol Machiavelli, who faked his death and came back seven days later to take revenge on his enemies.)

Needless to say, September 2003 came and went without a second coming. On the other hand, a clever marketing rep might call November 2003 a second coming of sorts, what with the barrage of anything and everything Tupac.......

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